Hot topic among the GOP Tea Bagger set right now is Drug Testing for Welfare recipients.

I think we should conduct Drug Testing and Criminal Background checks on anyone elected to office – with the result that if they fail, or have a criminal background they not be allowed to serve. Why exactly do we have a system in which felons can’t vote…But they can serve office and be party to sensitive national secrets? One of the first things they do when you get a Security Clearance at any level in this country is a Criminal Background Check. You got a Felony…You don’t get a clearance…Period.

On Monday, the freshman legislator appeared in District Court, Providence, and was ordered held without bail for failing to appear in court in Massachusetts in 2008 on charges of eluding the police and three other motor vehicle violations. He spent the weekend at the Adult Correctional Institutions after the Rhode Island State Police learned that there was a warrant for his arrest stemming from the stop by the Massachusetts State Police on Route 195 in Fall River.

By the end of the day, he had been transferred to Massachusetts authorities, who released him on $1,000 bail, according to the Associated Press.

Court records from Fall River and Taunton, Mass., show that Gordon, 42, a Republican representing Portsmouth, Tiverton and Little Compton, has a serious arrest record. He has spent more than five months locked up in the Bristol County House of Correction in North Dartmouth, Mass., on charges of attempted murder, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon and for a assaulting and threatening to kill his girlfriend. Read the rest of this entry »